A few days ago Sony released the 11th version of their consumer "Movie Studio HD Platinum" version of their popular PC video editing platform, Vegas. A variety of new features can be found in it, most importantly 3D stereoscopic editing support, and a faster h.264 decoder for AVCHD/digicam/dSLR footage.

One thing that iMovie and OSX are both missing is native AVCHD support. Microsoft easily beats Apple at this. I'm disappointed with Apple's neglect of H.264. I had to spend a few dollars to buy an addon to Finder just so I could see thumbnail previews of my AVCHD files.

Back in the day iMovie used to re-encode AVCHD and HDV footage in the Apple Intermediate Codec which was a disaster (a very lossy format actually). I don't know if it does the same still, of it's using ProRES instead now, but regardless, having to wait for re-encoding is not fun. Vegas Platinum 11 loads and edits these formats as-is, in real time. There is no waiting time.